John Peters Ringo (May 3, 1850 – July 13, 1882) was an American Old West outlaw loosely associated with the Cochise County Cowboys in frontier boomtown Tombstone, Arizona Territory. He took part in the Mason County War in Texas, during which he committed his first murder. He was arrested and charged with murder. He was affiliated with Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan, Ike Clanton, and Frank Stilwell during 1881–1882. He got into a confrontation in Tombstone with Doc Holliday and was suspected by Wyatt Earp of having taken part in the attempted murder of Virgil Earp and the ambush and death of Morgan Earp. Ringo was found dead with a bullet wound to his temple, which was ruled suicide. Modern writers have advanced various theories attributing his death to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Frank Leslie, or Michael O'Rourke.
Johnny Ringo, son of Martin and Mary Peters Ringo, had distant Dutch ancestry, and was born in what later became the small town of Greens Fork, Clay Township, Wayne County, Indiana. His family moved to Liberty, Missouri, in 1856. He was cousin related by marriage to the Younger brothers through his aunt Augusta Peters Inskip, who married Coleman P. Younger, uncle of the outlaws.
In 1858, his family moved from Liberty to Gallatin, where they rented property from the father of John W. Sheets, who became the first "official" victim of the James–Younger gang when they robbed the Daviess County Savings and Loan Association in 1869.
On July 30, 1864, when Johnny was 14, his family was in Wyoming en route to California. His father, Martin Ringo, was killed when he stepped off their wagon holding a shotgun, which accidentally discharged. The family buried Martin on a hillside alongside the trail.
Ringo left his mother, brother, and sisters in San Jose, California, in 1869 and moved to Mason County, Texas. He befriended an ex-Texas Ranger Scott Cooley, who was the adopted son of rancher Tim Williamson.
Trouble started when two American rustlers, Elijah and Pete Backus, were dragged from the Mason jail and lynched by a predominantly German mob. Full-blown war began on May 13, 1875, when Tim Williamson was arrested by a hostile posse and murdered by a German farmer named Peter "Bad Man" Bader. Cooley and his friends, including Johnny Ringo, conducted a terror campaign against their rivals. Officials called it the "Mason County War"; locally it was called the "Hoo-doo War". Cooley retaliated by killing local German ex-deputy sheriff John Worley, then taking his scalp and tossing his body down a well on August 10, 1875.
Cooley already had a reputation as a dangerous man and was respected as a Texas Ranger. He killed several others during the "war". After Cooley supporter Moses Baird was killed, Ringo murdered James Cheyney on September 25, 1875, with a friend named Bill Williams. They rode up to Cheyney's house. Cheyney (who had led Baird into the ambush) greeted them unarmed, invited them in, and began washing his face on the porch. Both Ringo and Williams shot and killed him. The two then rode to the house of Dave Doole and called him outside, but he came out with a gun and they fled back into town.
Sometime later, Scott Cooley and Johnny Ringo mistook Charley Bader for his brother Pete and killed him. Both men were jailed in Burnet, Texas, by Sheriff A. J. Strickland, but Ringo and Cooley soon broke out of jail with the help of their friends, and they parted company to evade the law.
The Mason County War ended around November 1876 after about a dozen individuals had been killed. Scott Cooley was thought to be dead and Johnny Ringo and his friend George Gladden were in jail. One of Ringo's alleged cellmates was notorious killer John Wesley Hardin. While Gladden was sentenced to 99 years, Ringo appears to have been acquitted. Two years later, Ringo was a constable in Loyal Valley, Texas. Soon after this, he traveled to Arizona.
Ringo first appeared in Cochise County, Arizona Territory, in 1879 with Joseph Graves Olney (alias "Joe Hill"), a friend from the Mason County War. In December 1879, a drunk Ringo shot unarmed Louis Hancock in a Safford, Arizona, saloon when Hancock refused a complimentary drink of whiskey, stating that he preferred beer. Hancock survived his wound. Soon after arriving in Tombstone, Arizona, he met editor Sam Purdy of The Tombstone Epitaph, who later writes of their talk: "He said that he was as certain of being killed as he was of living then. He said that he might run along for a couple years more, and may not last two days." In Tombstone, Ringo developed a reputation as having a bad temper. He may have participated in robberies and killings with the Cochise County Cowboys, a loosely associated group of outlaws. Occasionally but erroneously, he was referred to as "Ringgold" by local newspapers. He described himself as a "speculator" in the 1882 Cochise County Great Register.
Confrontation with Doc Holliday
On January 17, 1882, Ringo and Doc Holliday traded threats and seemed headed for a gunfight. Both men were arrested by Tombstone's sheriff, James Flynn, and hauled before a judge for carrying weapons in town. Both were fined. Judge William H. Stilwell followed up on charges outstanding against Ringo for a robbery in Galeyville and Ringo was rearrested and jailed on January 20 for the weekend. Ringo was suspected by the Earps of taking part in the December 28, 1881, ambush of Virgil Earp, that crippled him for life, and the March 18, 1882, murder of Morgan Earp while he was shooting pool in a Tombstone saloon.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp and his posse killed Frank Stilwell in Tucson on March 20, 1882. After the shooting, the Earps and a federal posse set out on a vendetta to find and kill the others they held responsible for ambushing Virgil and Morgan. Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan received warrants from a Tucson judge for arrest of the Earps and Holliday. He deputized Ringo and 19 other men, many of them friends of Stilwell and the Cochise County Cowboys.
During the Earp vendetta ride, Wyatt Earp killed one of Ringo's closest friends, "Curly Bill" Brocius, in a gunfight at Iron Springs (later Mescal Springs) about 20 miles (32 km) from Tombstone. Earp told his biographer, Stuart Lake, that a man named Florentino Cruz confessed to being the lookout at Morgan's murder and identified Ringo, Stilwell, Swilling, and Brocius as Morgan's killers.
The local posse pursued and came close to the federal posse at Henry C. Hooker's ranch, but never faced the Earp lawmen. Former Pima County Sheriff Bob Paul, who had been in Tombstone at the time and volunteered to ride with the Behan posse, wrote a letter to the Tucson Citizen on March 3, 1898, in response to an earlier story he said was full of errors. He said the Earp posse had told Hooker to tell Behan and his posse where they were camped. Hooker told Behan where the Earps were camped, but the posse left in the opposite direction.
During Tombstone's Fourth of July festivities, Ringo drank heavily. He left town two days later, taking several bottles of liquor for the ride. Deputy Billy Breakenridge saw him two days later near Dial's Ranch in the South Pass of the Dragoon Mountains. He later wrote, "Ringo was very drunk, reeling in the saddle." He encouraged Ringo to follow him back to the Goodrich Ranch, but "he was drunk and stubborn and went on his way. I think this was the last time he was seen alive." Around 3:00 pm on July 13, ranch hands at a nearby ranch heard a shot.
Teamster James Yoast was hauling wood when he found Ringo's body on July 14, seated in "a bunch of five large black jack oaks growing up in a semicircle from one root, and in the center of them was a large flat rock which made a comfortable seat." He was "not more than 700 feet from Smith's house" in West Turkey Creek Valley, near Chiricahua Peak in Arizona Territory. His body had already turned black from the desert heat.
His feet were wrapped in strips of cloth torn from his undershirt. Ringo had lost his horse with his boots tied to the saddle. The coroner's report noted, "He had evidently traveled but a short distance in this foot gear." A bullet hole was in his right temple and an exit wound was in the back of his head. The fatal wound was upward at a 45° angle between the right eye and ear. His revolver was still in his right hand.